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Disemvowelling

Constraint
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A constrained poetic form in which all vowels are removed from a text, leaving only consonants to suggest meaning through skeletal phonetic traces.

Detailed Definition
Disemvowelling strips text of vowels, reducing words to skeletal consonant clusters that challenge legibility; this constraint foregrounds language’s phonetic skeleton, often used in experimental or internet contexts to obscure meaning while retaining rhythmic potential, and explores how minimalism, censorship, or linguistic decay can transform reading into an act of reconstruction or resistance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Disemvowelling removes vowels: “Th qck brwn fx jmps” as poetic constraint; internet disemvowelling adapted to minimalist verse; Oulipo experiments with consonantal skeletons; disemvowelled haiku for visual starkness; poets use it to mimic censorship or erasure; reconstructed disemvowelled texts become riddles.
Additional Notes
Disemvowelling removes vowels, leaving consonantal skeletons. Used in internet culture and Oulipo. Students can explore readability limits or mimic censorship. It connects to lipograms and visual minimalism.
Also Known As
Vowel removal disemvoweling
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